Few could be
unaware that an increasing proportion of the workforce
is engaged in intermittent or irregular work. But I'd
like to set aside for the moment the weight and scope of
the evidentiary, those well-rehearsed findings that
confirm beyond doubt the discovery and currency of
precariousness and which render the axiomatic terrain
upon which such facts are discovered beyond reproach.
Instead, I would like to explore something of the
grammar at work in these discussions. As a noun, 'precariousness'
is both more unwieldy and indeterminate than most. If it
is possible to say anything for certain about
precariousness, it is that it teeters. This is to begin
by emphasising some of the tensions that shadow much of
the discussion about precarious labour. Some of those
tensions can be located under various, provisional
headings which bracket the oscillation between
regulation and deregulation, organisation and
dissemination, homogenous and concrete time, work and
life.

There are notable
instances of this: consider recent research commissioned
by Australia's foremost trade union body, the ACTU,
into what they call 'non-standard' forms of work. As
reported, most of those surveyed said they would like
'more work.' It is not clear to what extent that answer
was shaped by the research, that is: by the ACTU's persistent
arguments for a return to 'standard hours,' re-regulation,
or their more general regard for Fordism as the golden
age of social democracy and union organisation. 'Non-standard
work' has mostly been viewed by unions as a threat,
not only to working conditions but, principally, to
the continuing existence of the unions themselves.

But what is clear
is that the flight from 'standard hours' was not precipitated
by employers but rather by workers seeking less time
at work. This flight coincided with the first wave of
an exit from unions. What the Italian Workerists dubbed
'the refusal of work' in the late 1970s had its anglophone
counterpart in the figure of the 'slacker'. This predated
the 'flexiblisation' of employment that took hold in
the 1980s. The failure of this oppositional strategy
nevertheless provoked what Andrew Ross has called the
'industrialisation of bohemia'. Given that capitalism
persisted, the flight from Fordist regularity and full
time work can be said to have necessitated the innovation
and extension of capitalist exploitation ­ much like
gentrification has followed university students around
suburbs and de-industrialising areas since the 1970s.

The search for a
life outside work tended to reduce into an escape from
the factory and its particular forms of discipline.
And so, perhaps paradoxically, this flight triggered
an indistinction between work and life commensurate
with the movement of exploitation into newer areas.
This is why the answer of 'more work' now presents itself
so often as the horizon of an imaginable solution to
the problem of impoverishment and financial instability
­ not more money or more life outside work, but more
work.

Take the distinction
between work-time and leisure-time. These categories
become formalised with Fordism, its temporal rhythm
as measured out by the wage, clock and assembly line,
and distinguished by a proportionality and particular
division of times, as in the eight hour day and the
five day week. Here, leisure-time bears a determined
relationship to work ­ as the trade-off for the mind-numbing
tedium of the assembly line, as rejuvenation, and as
temporary respite from the mind-body split that line-work
enforces. Yet leisure time was, still, substantively
a time of not-work.

By comparison, while
the perpetually irregular work of post-Fordism might,
though not necessarily, decrease the actual amount of
time spent doing paid work, it nevertheless enjoins
the post-Fordist worker to be continually available
for such work, to regard life outside waged work as
a time of preparation for and readiness to work. Schematically
put: whereas Fordism sought to cretinise, to sever the
brains of workers from their bodies so as to assign
thought, knowledge, planning and control to management,
post-Fordist capitalism might by contrast be characterised
­ in Foucault's terms ­ as the imprisonment of the body
by the soul. Hence the utility of desire, knowledge,
and sociality in post-Fordism.

The long, Protestant
history of assuming work as an ethical or moral imperative
returns in the not-always secular injunction to treat
one's self as a commodity both during and outside actual
work time. One can always try to defer the ensuing panic
and anxiety with pharmacology, as Franco Berardi argues.
But something might also be said here about that other
'opiate,' the parallel rise of an enterprising, evangelical
Christianity; not to mention attempts to freeze contingency
in communitarianism, of one variant or another. The
precariousness of life ­ experienced all the more insistently
because life depends on paid work ­ tends to close the
etymological distance between prayer (precor) and the
precarious (precarius).

Precarious Subjects

The term 'Precarity'
might have replaced 'precariousness' with the advantage
of a prompt neologism; yet both continue to be burdened
by a normative bias which seeks guarantees in terms
that are often neither plausible nor desirable. Precariousness
is mostly rendered in negative terms, as the imperative
to move from irregularity to regularity, or from abnormality
to normality. That normative burden is conspicuous in
the grammatical development from adjective to noun:
precarious to precariousness, condition to name.

Yet, capitalism is
perpetually in crisis. Capital is precarious, and normally
so. Stability here has always entailed formalising relative
advantages between workers, either displacing crises
onto the less privileged, or deferring the effects of
those crises through debt. Moreover, what becomes apparent
in discussions on precariousness is that warranties
are often sought, even by quite different approaches,
in the juridical realm. The law becomes the secularised
language of prayer against contingency. This assumes
a distinction between law and economy that is certainly
no longer, if it ever was, all that plausible. It is
not clear, therefore, whether the motif of precariousness
works to simply entice a desire for its opposite, security,
regardless if this is presented as a return to a time
in which security apparently reigned or as a future
newly immunised against precariousness.

There are nationalist
denominations. Precarity (or precarité), in its current
expression, emerged in French sociology and its attempts
to grasp the convergence of struggles by unemployed
and intermittent workers in the late 1990s. Most prominently,
Bourdieu was among those who raised the issue of a diffuse
precarité as an argument for the strengthening of the
Nation State against this, as well as the globalisation
that was said to have produced it. In its far less nationalist
versions, the discussion on precarity is marked ­ sometimes
ambivalently and not always explicitly ­ by the presentation
of a hoped-for means of resistance, if not revolution.
A renewed focus on changing forms of class composition
or new subjectivities may have brought with it an irreversible
and overdue shift in perspective and vocabulary. But
that shift has not in all cases disturbed the structural
assumptions of an orthodox Marxism in the assertion
of a newer, therefore more adequate, vanguard. Names
confer identity as if positing an unconditional presupposition.
Like all such assertions, it is not simply the declaration
that one has discovered the path to a different future
in an existing identity that remains questionable. More
problematically, such declarations are invariably the
expression and reproduction of a hierarchy of value
in relation to others.

For instance, if
Lenin's Party, defined as the figure of the 'revolutionary
intellectual', paid homage to the mind-body split of
Fordism and Taylorism (where others were either cast
as a 'mass' or, where actively oppositional, 'counterrevolutionaries'),
to what extent has the discussion on precarious labour
avoided a similar duplication of segmentation and conformism?
Or, to put the question in classical Marxist terms:
to what extent can an identity which is immanent to
capitalism (whether 'working class' or 'multitude')
be expected to abolish capitalism, and therefore its
very existence and identity? Does a politics which takes
subjectivity as its question and answer reproduce a
politics as the idealised image of such? A recourse
to an Enlightenment Subject replete with the stratifications
which presuppose it, and ledgered according to its current
values (or valuations), not least among these being
the distinction between paid and unpaid labour.

Let me put still
this another way: the discussion of the precarious conditions
of 'creative labour' and the 'industrialisation of bohemia'
tends to restage a manoeuvre found in Puccini's opera
La Boheme. Here, a bunch of guys (a poet, philosopher,
artist and musician) suffer for their art in their garret.
But it is the character of Mimi ­ the seamstress who
talks of fripperies rather than art ­ who furnishes
Puccini and our creative heroes with the final tragedy
with which to exalt that art as suffering and through
opera. The figure of the artist (or 'creative labourer')
may well circulate, in some instances, as the exemplary
figure of the post-Fordist worker ­ precarious, immaterial
and so on ­ but this requires a moment in which the
precarious conditions of others are declared to be a
result of their 'invisibility' or 'exclusion'.

For what might turn
out to have been the briefest of political moments,
the exemplary figure of precariousness was that of undocumented
migrant workers, without citizenship but nevertheless
inside national economic space, and precarious in more
senses than might be indicated by other uses of the
word. And, far from arriving with the emergence of newer
industries or subjectivities, precarious work has been
a more or less constant feature of domestic work, retail,
'hospitality,' agriculture, sex work and the building
industry, as well as sharply inflecting the temporal
and financial arrangements which come into play in the
navigation of child-rearing and paid work for many women.
But rather than shaking assertions that the 'precariat'
is a recent phenomenon, through the declaration that
such work was previously 'invisible', the apprehension
of migrant, 'Third World' and domestic labour seems
to have become the pretext for calls for the reconstruction
of the plane of visibility (of juridical recognition
and mediation) and the eventual circulation and elevation
of the cultural-artistic (and cognitive) worker as its
paradigmatic expression. The strategy of exodus (of
migration) has been translated into the thematics of
inclusion, visibility and recognition.

On a global scale
and in its privatised and/or unpaid versions, precarity
is and has always been the standard experience of work
in capitalism. When one has no other means to live than
the ability to labour or ­ even more precariously, since
it privatises a relation of dependency ­ to reproduce
and 'humanise' the labour publicly tendered by another,
life becomes contingent on capital and therefore precarious.

The experience of
regular, full-time, long-term employment which characterised
the most visible, mediated aspects of Fordism is an
exception in capitalist history. That presupposed vast
amounts of unpaid domestic labour by women and hyper-exploited
labour in the colonies. This labour also underpinned
the smooth distinction between work and leisure for
the Fordist factory worker. The enclosures and looting
of what was once contained as the Third World and the
affective, unpaid labour of women allowed for the consumerist,
affective 'humanisation' ­ and protectionism ­ of what
was always a small part of the Fordist working class.
A comparably privileged worker who was nonetheless elevated
to the exemplary protagonist of class struggle by way
of vanguardist reckonings. Those reckonings tended to
parallel the valuations of bodies by capital, as reflected
in the wage. The 'lower end' of the (global) labour
market and divisions of labour ­ impoverishment, destitution
or a privatised precariousness ­ were accounted for,
as an inherent attribute of skin colour and sex, as
natural. In many respects, then, what is registered
as the recent rise of precarity is actually its discovery
among those who had not expected it by virtue of the
apparently inherent and eternal (perhaps biological)
relation between the characteristics of their bodies
and their possible monetary valuation ­ a sense of worth
verified by the demarcations of the wage (paid and unpaid)
and in the stratification of wage levels.

Biopolitical Arithmetic

To be sure, there
are important reasons to continue a discussion of precarious
labour and precarity, of how changes to work-time become
diffused as a disposition. Precarity is a particularly
useful way to open a discussion on the no longer punctual
dimensions of the encounter between worker and employer,
and how this gives rise to a generalised indistinction
between the labour market, self, relationships and life.

The more interesting
aspect of this discussion is the connection made between
the uncertainty of making a living and therefore the
uncertainty of life that is thereby produced in its
grimly mundane as well as horrific aspects: impoverishment,
as both persistent threat and circumstance; the 'war
on terror'; the internment camps; 'humanitarian intervention',
and so on. In this, the topic of biopolitics re-emerges
with some urgency ­ or rather this urgency becomes more
tangible for that privileged minority of workers (or
'professionals') who were previously unfamiliar with
its full force. Impoverishment and war pronounce austere
verdicts upon lives reckoned as interchangeable and
therefore at risk of being declared superfluous. What
does it means to insist here, against its capitalist
calculations, on the 'value of life'?

This raises numerous
questions. What are the intersections between economic
and political-ethical values? Does value have a measure,
a standard by which all values (lives) are calculated
and related? Transformed into organisational questions:
how feasible is it to use precarity as a means for alliances
or coalition-building without effacing the differences
between Mimi and the Philosopher, or indeed reproducing
the hierarchy between them? Is it in the best interests
for the maquiladora worker to ally herself with the
fashion designer? Such questions cannot be answered
abstractly. But there are two, perhaps difficult and
irresolvable questions that might be still be posed.

First, what are the
specific modes of exploitation of particular kinds of
work? If the exploitation and circulation of 'cognitive'
or 'creative labour' consists, as Maurizio Lazzarato
argues, in the injunction to 'be active, to communicate,
to relate to others' and to 'become subjects', then
how does this shape their interactions with others,
for better or worse? How does the fast food 'chainworker',
who is compelled to be affective, compliant, and routinised
not assume such a role in relation to a software programming
'brainworker', whose habitual forms of exploitation
oblige opinion, innovation and self-management? How
is it possible for the latter to avoid assuming for
themselves the specialised role of mediator ­ let alone
preening themselves in the cognitariat's mirror as the
subject, actor or 'activist' of politics ­ in this relationship?
To what extent do the performative imperatives of artistic-cultural
exploitation (visibility, recognition, authorship) foreclose
the option of clandestinity which remains an imperative
for the survival of many undocumented migrants and workers
in the informal economy?

Secondly, why exactly
is it important to search for a device by which to unify
workers ­ however plurally that unity is configured?
Leaving aside the question of particular struggles ­
say, along specific production chains ­ it is not all
that clear what the benefits might be of insisting that
precarity can function as this device for recomposing
what was in any case the fictitious ­ and highly contested
­ unity of 'the working class'. To be sure, that figure
is being challenged by that of 'the multitude', but
what is the specific nature of this challenge?

Ellen Rooney once
noted that pluralism is a deeper form of conformism:
while it allows for a diversity of content, conflict
over the formal procedures which govern interaction
are off-limits, as is the power of those in whose image
and interest those rules of interaction are constituted.
Often, this arises because the procedures established
for interaction and the presentation of any resulting
'unity' are so habitual that they recede beyond view.
Those who raise problems with them therefore tend to
be regarded as the sources of conflict if not the architects
of a fatal disunity of the class. A familiar, if receding,
example: sexism is confined to being a 'women's issue',
among a plurality of 'issues,' but it cannot disrupt
the form of
politics.

What then is the
arithmetic of biopolitics emerging from the destitution
of its Fordist forms? If Fordist political forms consecrated
segmentations that were said to inhere, naturally, in
the difference of bodies, then what is post-Fordism's
arithmetic? Post-Fordism dreams of the global community
of 'human capital', where differences are either marketable
or reckoned as impediments to the free flow of 'humanity'
as ­ or rather for ­ capital. In short, political pluralism
is the idealised version of the post-Fordist market.

It might be useful
here to specify that commodification does not consist
in the acts of buying and selling ­ which obviously
predate capitalism. Rather, commodification means the
application of a universal standard of measure that
relates and reduces qualitative differences ­ of bodies,
actions, work ­ according to the abstract measure of
money. Abstract equivalence, without its idyllic depictions,
presupposes and produces hierarchy, exploitation and
violence. Formally, which is to say juridically: neither
poor nor rich are allowed to sleep under bridges.

What does it mean,
then, to argue that the conditions of precarious workers
might be served by a more adequate codification of rights?
It does not, I think, mean that our conditions will
improve or, rather, be guaranteed by such. Proposals
for 'global citizenship' by Negri and Hardt are predated
by the global reach of a militaristic humanitarianism
that has already defined its meaning of the convergence
between 'human rights' and supra-national force. Similarly,
a 'basic income' has already been shown, in the places
it exists such as Australia, to be contingent upon and
constitutive of intermittent engagements with waged
work, if not forced labour, as in work-for-the-dole
schemes. The latter policy was applied to unemployed
indigenous people before it became a recent measure
against the unemployed generally. Basic incomes do not
suspend the injunction to work often in low paid, casual
or informal jobs; they are deliberately confined to
levels which provide for a bare life but not for a livelihood.
The introduction of work-for-the-dole schemes indicate
that, where 'human capital' does not flow freely as
such, policy (and pluralism) will resort to direct coercion,
cancelling the formally voluntary contract of wage labour.
The introduction of the work-for-the-dole scheme for
indigenous people in Australia followed on the collapse
in their employment rates after the introduction of
'equal pay' laws. Their 'failure to circulate' was explained
as an inherent, often biological, attribute (chiefly
as laziness) and, therefore, the resort to forced labour
was rendered permissible by those politicians who most
loudly proclaimed their commitment to multiculturalism
and the reconciliation of indigenous and 'settler' Australians.

So, how might it
be possible to disassociate the value of life from the
values of capital? Or, with regard to the relation between
a globalised nationalism and aspirations for supra-national
arrangements: how to sever the various daily struggles
against precariousness from the enticements of a global
security-state? Rights are not something one possesses
­ even if many of us are reputed, by correlation, to
possess our own labour in the form of an increasingly
self-managed or self-employed exploitation. Rights,
like power, are exercised,
in practice and by bodies. As juridical codes, they
are both bestowed and denied by the state, at its discretion.
There are no guarantees and there will always be a struggle
to exercise particular rights, irrespective of whether
they are codified in law. But, as a strategy, the path
of rights means praying that the law or state might
distribute rights and entrusting it with the authority
and force to deny them.

That said, precarity
might well have us teetering, it might even do so evocatively,
for better and often worse, praying for guarantees and,
at times, shields that often turn out to be fortresses.
But it is yet to dispense with, for all its normative
expressions, a relationship to the adjective: to movement,
however uncertain. 'Precarious' is as much a description
of patterns of worktime as it is the description, experience,
hopes and fears of a faltering movement ­ in more senses
than one, and possibly since encountering the limits
of the anti-summit protests. This raises the risk of
movements that become trapped in communitarian fears
or in dreams of a final end to risk in the supposedly
secure embrace of global juridical recognition. Yet,
it also makes clear that a different future, by definition,
can only be constructed precariously, without firm grounds
for doing so, without the measure of a general rule,
and with questions that should, often, shake us ­ particularly
what 'us' might mean.